Although visual imagery is argued to be an essential component of autobiographical memory, there have been surprisingly few studies on autobiographical memory processes in blind individuals, who have had no or limited visual input. The purpose of the present study was to investigate how blindness affects retrieval and phenomenology of autobiographical memories. We asked 48 congenital/early blind and 48 sighted participants to recall autobiographical memories in response to six cue words, and to fill out the Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire measuring a number of variables including imagery, belief and recollective experience associated with each memory. Blind participants retrieved fewer memories and reported higher auditory imagery at retrieval than sighted participants. Moreover, within the blind group, participants with total blindness reported higher auditory imagery than those with some light perception. Blind participants also assigned higher importance, belief and recollection ratings to their memories than sighted participants. Importantly, these group differences remained the same for recent as well as childhood memories.
Recall of canonical categories has been widely used to measure flashbulb memory performance. However, these canonical categories are based on a single study and have been inconsistently used in the literature making comparisons across studies potentially problematic. The purpose of the present study was to provide further data toward determining the generality of canonical categories. We asked 135 participants to provide open-ended narratives of how they first learned about three public events, one of which was also a personal event for some of the participants. Results showed that seven categories of information consisting of two new categories (others present and thought) in addition to the five identified by Brown and Kulik (place, informant, activity, own affect, and aftermath) accounted for most of the information in flashbulb memory narratives.
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